Edward Curtin “A treasure stumbled upon, suddenly; not gradually accumulated, by adding one to one. The accumulation of learning, ‘adding to the sum-total of human knowledge’; lay that burden down, that baggage, that impediment. Take nothing for your journey; travel light.” Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body These are “heavy” times, colloquially speaking. Forebodings everywhere. Everything broken. …
Edward Curtin “The technical achievement of advanced industrial society, and the effective manipulation of mental and material productivity have brought about a shift in the locus of mystification. . . . the rational rather than the irrational becomes the most effective vehicle of mystification.” Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man “General, man is very uselful. He can fly and he …
Simon Elmer Der Zauberlehrling (1797) is the title of a famous ballad by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a re-telling of an ancient Egyptian myth that was later put to music by the French composer, Paul Dukas, in his orchestral scherzo L’Apprenti sorcier (1897). The latter was chosen for the title of a text published in …
Edward Curtin Audio Version New Feature! “They didn’t act like people and they didn’t act like actors. It’s hard to explain.” JD Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, 1951 There’s a reason that Catcher in the Rye, published 70 years ago, has become such an iconic book, praised and condemned in equal measure. It is because it is about …
Edward Curtin In 1888, the year before he went insane, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote the following in Twilight of the Idols: We have got rid of the real world: what world is left? The apparent world perhaps? … But no! Along with the real world we’ve done away with the apparent world as well. So, if you feel …
Does Nietzsche have anything important to say to us, we the current inhabitants of a global age?
Nietzsche speaks of spiritual health as a result of the superabundance of the life force, of a Dionysian affirmation of one’s existence of one’s process of becoming what one is.
The courage of laughter is called for. A profound laughter that is in a position to negate what Nietzsche regarded as the worst possible thought: that existence, my existence, repeats itself over and over again without end, forever.
The Enlightenment meta-narrative of bourgeois-capitalism is committed to mediocrity. In fact, the Enlightenment meta-narrative of bourgeois-capitalism celebrates it. Everywhere the meta-narrative of bourgeois-capitalism reigns supreme, mediocrity follows, due to the fact mediocrity is the order and the criterion of any type of hierarchy founded on the Enlightenment meta-narrative of bourgeois-capitalism.
Beyond Good and Evil is the title of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical work. It is a highly controversial book in which he successfully debunks the tenets of Christianity and in which he relativises the notions of good and evil. There are two types of morality, he argues, the ruler-morality and the slave-morality. It is the difference between them which is considered good and evil. The ruler-morality considers good to be the ‘noble’ and the ‘warlike’, the strong and the powerful, the dominant with the will-to-life (which is
